"Has he lived in South America?" asked Rachel.
"He has lived all over the world, I think. He's a rolling stone, my dear, that's what he is—with the proverbial consequences."
"Is he poor, then?"
"Poor as a church mouse. That is to say, he has got a bit of an estate somewhere in Scotland or Ireland—I really forget which—an old ruin of a house mortgaged to the chimney-pots, and a few starved farms, that bring him in a few odd hundreds now and again. He tries all sorts of queer schemes for mending his fortunes, but they never come to anything."
"Perhaps he is one of the unlucky ones—like my poor father," suggested Rachel.
"I don't know. I'm afraid he's a ne'er-do-weel. Judging from his past history—Jim Gordon knows all about him—he has no worse enemy than himself."
"What is his history?" Rachel asked the question with a vague sense of resentment against her prosperous host, who had probably never known misfortunes.
"Well, he was an only son, and I suppose spoilt—to begin with. He was brought up for the army—simply, as far as I can make out, from force of habit, because his father and no end of grandfathers had been soldiers before him—instead of being taught how to manage and improve that ramshackle old property of his.
"He was in a crack cavalry regiment; one of the worst of them—I mean for folly and extravagance; and he went no end of a pace, as if he had the Bank of England at his back, and got all his affairs into a mess; and then he got gambling at Newmarket. The story goes that he played a brother-officer for some woman that they were both in love with; and he staked everything he had in the world that he could lay his hands on, except that old land and house, which the law kept for his children. Fortunately, he is not married, nor ever likely to be."
"And he lost her?" said Rachel, in an awed whisper, with something very like tears in her eyes.